


Although We Are Miles Apart

by thecatwholovedkira



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Divorce, Kid Fic, Other, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-01
Updated: 2017-07-08
Packaged: 2018-11-07 14:02:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11060511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecatwholovedkira/pseuds/thecatwholovedkira
Summary: This wasn't what he wanted for his child. It wasn't what he wanted for himself either, but it took Meredith to realize that. So Peter leaves to save his child, himself, and the galaxy.





	1. What's the Matter with You? Feel Right, Don't You Feel Right Baby?

**Author's Note:**

> It's my birthday and I'll rewrite three year old movies with a kid and unhealthy relationships if I want to.

            This was supposed to be an easy job. Go to Morag, get the orb, go back to Xandar and collect the loot. Easy. Peter had thought that it was safe to give into Meredith’s begging and bring him along.

            “Do I _have_ to stay on the ship?” Meredith had asked, flopping across two chairs as he watched his mother don his coat on and holster his gun.

            Peter looked at his son. Time was meaningless in space and he never used the solar cycles of the planet he was born on to try and measure Meredith’s age, always doing quick calculations to measure how old he was in Terran years. He was about seven.

            Yondu had already had Peter stealing shit by that age and Peter had hated it, but here Meredith was, fucking begging for a chance.

            “You know, when I was your age, I was begging to stay on the ship. The weather’s terrible and God only knows what’s waiting out there for a taste of Terran. An entire planet of people don’t just pack up and leave for no reason, Meredith,” Peter said as he started rummaging through cabinets, packing his satchel.

            “Daddy would let me,” Meredith muttered, folding his arms and slouching down on his chair.

            Peter was glad that he had his back turned to Meredith so he couldn’t see his expression. “Good thing Daddy’s not here then, huh?”

            “You need to stop coddling me,” Meredith said, echoing Yondu’s favorite spiel.

            Peter thrust his light orb into his bag a bit too forcefully. He took a deep breath, slung his satchel over his shoulder, and squatted down in front of Meredith, cupping his face. “You’re my baby, and I’ll coddle you all I want to.”

            “I’m not a _baby_!”

            “You sure are pouting like one.”

            “No I’m not!” Meredith said, slapping his palms down on his thighs.

            “Give Mama a kiss bye-bye.”

            Meredith folded his arms and looked away, but after a few seconds he softened, putting his arms around his mother and giving him a kiss. When Peter tried to break away, he clung to him.

            “Can I? Pleeeaasse?”

            He looked into Meredith’s eyes. He had his mother’s eyes, not his father’s. Peter’s grandfather had said the same thing.

            Genetics was a crazy thing. All of the DNA in Meredith’s mitochondrial cells came from the planet Terra, millions of lightyears away, passed all the way from Eve to his grandmother Meredith to Peter to Meredith. A planet he had never been and might never go to. A planet his only connection to was those thirty seven genes and twelve songs.

            Peter sighed and looked down at the floor. “Okay.” Meredith’s whoop drowned out the next part, which was, “But you had better do everything I say, mister!”

            After a flurry of activity wherein Meredith grabbed his coat, shoes, and blaster and put them on, they walked down the gangplank to the steamy surface of Morag.

            “Put your hood up,” Peter said, taking his own advice.

            Finding their path, Peter guided Meredith past the geysers, trying to not have a heart attack as he skipped blithely on inches past death, whistling “Come and Get Your Love.” 

            When they reached the entrance to some sort of building where the orb would be, Peter told Meredith “Hold my hand, baby.”

            “Mama!” Meredith said, rolling his eyes and folding his arms.

            “Really? You don’t want to hold your poor mama’s hand? That’s okay. I’ll just be over here, dying of a broken heart. You can get the orb and pilot the ship back, right?” Peter said, leaning over dramatically with one hand splayed on his forehead and the other stretched out to Meredith.

            With a sigh, Meredith took his hand, and Peter immediately straightened and swung Meredith into a dance.

            “Get it together baby, come and get your love!” Peter sang, and Meredith joined him.

            While nothing more dangerous than vermin impeded their dancing, Peter kept a sharp eye out, guiding Meredith through dance steps and puddles and chasms.

            They reached a set of doors that seemed to be the inner sanctum where the orb would be waiting.

            “I’m going to pick this lock and you’re going to be the lookout. Okay?”

            “Okay!” Meredith said, standing at attention at the door and looking out into the cavernous dark for anything. It was so cute. Peter gave his son a fond smile before devoting all his attention to picking the lock.

            “If you see anything, holler.”

            After his careful ministrations, the doors swung open. Peter activated his light orb as he approached what surely must be his target. Just as he set it on the floor, Meredith whisper-shouted “Somebody’s coming!”

            “Come in here and close the door!” Peter hissed back, glancing between Meredith and the orb as it struggled to break free of its barrier.

            With who know how many centuries of disuse, the doors closed not like they had opened, but with a cacophony of groans, grinds, and squeaks, making Peter’s heart sink to the soles of his boots. It would definitely attract the attention of whoever was coming.

            “You got your gun, baby?”

            “Yeah,” Meredith said. He sounded a little shaken.

            “Well, don’t draw it yet.” He yanked Meredith behind him.

            The orb finally broke through its confines, and Peter grabbed it just as the door was thrown open by several people with guns. This was not good.

            “Drop it!” the one in the lead said.

            “Uh…hey—”

            “Drop it now!” He said something to the others that Peter’s translator didn’t recognize, and they surrounded them. Shit, this was really bad.

            “Hey, cool man, no problem—” Peter said, letting the orb fall to the floor as the two others started to nudge Peter and Meredith with their guns. Peter moved his hand down to hold onto Meredith, leaving the other palm up, squeezing hard. Not yet. “No problem at all!”

            “How do you know about this?” the lead alien demanded, picking up the orb.

            “I don’t even know what that is! We’re just junkers, man. Just checking stuff out!”

            “You don’t look like a junker. You’re wearing Ravager garb!”

            “It’s just an _outfit_ , man—” One of the aliens tried to yank Meredith away, but Peter grabbed him back. “Ninja turtle, you better stop—”

            “What are your names!” the alien suddenly roared. Peter could feel Meredith flinch. He hoped his trigger finger wasn’t itching.

            “My name is Peter Quill! This is my son, Meredith, okay? Dude, chill out!”

            “Move!”

            “Why?” Here it was. Meredith knew it too, and he tensed against Peter.

            “Ronan may have questions for you.” He turned to leave, but Peter still needed some time. He had imperceptibly been inching forward, but he wasn’t there yet.

            “Hey, you know what, there’s another name you might know me by,” he said.

            The alien turned around, and Peter waited for a dramatic pause while he slowly shuffled forward.

            “Star-Lord.”

            The alien looked confused. “Who?”

            Oh, come on. “Star-Lord, man. The legendary outlaw? Guys?”

            “Move!”

            “Okay, forget this,” Peter muttered, kicking the light orb out from underneath his foot to the goons with guns behind him. The first alien turned around just in time for Meredith’s shot to hit him in the front instead of the back. Peter hit him twice more for good measure, then scooped up the orb and Meredith.

            “ _This_ is why you can’t come with me!” Peter shouted as they made a mad dash for their ship.

            Either that dude had some damn fine armor or some interesting alien biology, because Peter could hear him way too fucking close behind them, yelling something and firing off blasts.

            Too fucking close in front of their ship was even more aliens with even more guns. He hoped that their armor was made of what he thought it was made out of, because he could only think of one way to disable them.

            He lobbed something at them. It wasn’t a grenade like they had been expecting, but the magnetic pull did just as good a job at keeping them from shooting and Peter and Meredith for now. He grabbed Meredith and jumped, landing in the cockpit of the _Milano_ without any major injuries. At least, he hoped not. Peter had to leave Meredith on the floor while he got them the hell off this godforsaken planet.

            Peter was frantically engaging the launch sequence as he watched their pursuers take out the _really_ big guns. If one of those blasts hit the _Milano_ , she would be completely disabled and they would have no choice but to find out whatever this Ronan guy wanted.

            He grabbed the controls just in the nick of time to avoid the incoming blast, and promptly started flying the hell out there. He couldn’t reach escape velocity while dodging necroblasts, so he would have to fly to a safer part of the planet before he could put the _Milano_ on an escape trajectory.

            The geysers that pockmarked the face of Morag were another obstacle to dodge, but more than skilled piloting, it took lucky timing. Peter had a lurching few seconds to contemplate that as a geyser erupted right under the _Milano_ , drowning the thrusters and sending them spiraling towards the surface. Everything in the cockpit was falling, including Peter himself, who hadn’t had time to strap himself in. There was a yelp from Meredith and a _thump_ as he hit the back wall.

            Peter strained forward, reaching his hand out to the thruster, until he grabbed it and halted the _Milano_ ’s death spiral.

            The _Milano_ righted itself, everything falling to the floor. “Meredith!” Peter called, crawling over to where he was splayed out on the floor.

            “ ‘m fine,” Meredith said, sitting up and rubbing the back of his head. Peter was worried that he might have a concussion, but his eyes didn’t seem dilated and they really needed to go before the others caught up with them.

            He scrambled back into the pilot’s seat and set them on a course to escape the planet. They needed to jump fast to lose their pursuers. There was already another craft incoming.  

            He set the computer to calculate the escape velocity as he put the pedal to the metal. A sonic boom reverberated as they broke the sound barrier. The computer spit out the acceleration required and was automatically speeding up the _Milano_ to reach it. It beeped and the console turned green as they broke free of gravity and Morag’s atmosphere, finally into dark, welcoming space.

            Careful to avoid the gravity wells of the other celestial bodies, he made a beeline for the jump point, anxiously scanning for incoming ships. It seems like he had lost them, but he didn’t fully relax until they had jumped a few times, throwing any would-be pursuers off the scent.

            He activated the autopilot, setting a course for Xandar, and went to find Meredith. He was still in the cockpit, picking up all of the things from Peter’s childhood that had fallen out of his old backpack.

            Peter felt a smile split his face. “Bless your little heart,” stooping down to help him.

            “Mama, why are all your things here?”

            He faltered. “We’re going to be away for a while. I thought I’d like all of my things. We packed all your stuff too, remember?”

            “For how long?” Meredith’s eyes were questioning, and Peter could somehow feel sharpness in them. Maybe he had his Daddy’s eyes after all. He turned away to hang his backpack up and to avoid Meredith’s gaze.

            “I don’t know, baby. A while. Come here, let me see if you’re hurt.”

            A thorough inspection revealed quite a few scrapes, but most of them were of dubious freshness and only one was bleeding. Peter cleaned it and put a liquid bandage on it just to be sure. Meredith only winced slightly.

            “Now you see why I don’t want you comin’ with me?” Peter said, his voice tight.

            “I was brave!” Meredith protested.

            “Yes, you were. You were so brave, baby,” he said, giving Meredith a hug. He hissed when Peter caressed the back of his head, bringing his attention back to the task at hand. Meredith’s back and the back of his head were tender and bruised. Peter took off the kayak rental shirt that had been his a long time ago and rubbed cream on Meredith’s injuries.

            “I suppose you’ll be wanting some breakfast now after all of that excitement,” Peter said as he slipped the shirt back over Meredith’s outstretched arms.

            “Yes!” he replied with possibly more excitement than he had mustered when he had allowed him to tag along on Morag. Peter laughed, kissed him on the nose, and went and made breakfast.

            Peter was sipping his coffee and half-watching the news while Meredith inhaled his eggs and sausage with gusto. Put into a soothing trance by staring aimlessly at the screen, Peter didn’t pay attention to the beep that signaled he was getting a call until Meredith piped up, “It’s Daddy!” and put him on screen.

            For what must have been the fourth or fifth time today, Peter’s stomach bottomed out. That was why he had no damn appetite. He hadn’t wanted to face Yondu so soon.

            “Peter?” Yondu’s voice boomed from the speakers.

            “Hi, Daddy!” Meredith said.

            “Hey, Meredith.”

            “Hey, Yondu,” Peter said, taking a big gulp of his coffee. He wished he had snuck some booze in it.

            “Where the heck are you? I’m on Morag, ain’t no orb, ain’t no _you_ —”

            “Didn’t really want to stick around, what with everybody trying to kidnap us.”

            “Who?” Yondu demanded, frowning.

            “I don’t know. Some dude named Ronan.”

            “Well where you at now?”

            Well, here it was. The threshold from whence there would be no return. Peter took a deep breath. “I feel really bad about this, but I’m not going to tell you that.”

            Peter could see Yondu’s eyes flash with anger even with the crappy connection. “And why not?” he demanded.

            “You remember what we talked about? That I needed…needed space?” Peter said, trying to fight his throat from closing.

            “Space? You need _space_? I oughta toss you out an airlock. That enough _space_ for ya?” Yondu roared.

            Peter stood firm. “No. That’s not enough space for me. I need space, and time. Time to…figure stuff out.”

            “Figure _what_ out?” He had Yondu hopping mad now, and Peter’s body was already storing up all his dread in tense muscles and churning intestines. But this time there would be no later.

            “Everything,” he said in a hoarse whisper, and oh God he was about to cry. Fuck, they were having this conversation in front of God and everybody. Meredith. The crew. This wasn’t how he wanted planned this.

            “Peter!”

            “I’m sorry, Yondu. Me and Meredith are going away for a while. For…a long time,” Peter said, ignoring Yondu trying to talk over him. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I still love you, you know? But, it’s not working. It’s not working. It’s...not,” he whispered hoarsely.

            He ended the call without hearing Yondu’s reply. He turned towards Meredith, wiping away tears burgeoning in his eyes.

            “Mama?” His hand was frozen holding up his fork, a piece of sausage dangling and dripping grease onto his plate. His eyes were wide, and he had the look of a prey animal, frozen when it senses danger.

            Yondu was calling him again. Peter reached over and pressed the ignore button.

            “Baby…”

            Meredith bolted out of his chair, running to the bedroom. Peter heard one or two sobs break from him before he slammed the door.

            “Yeah, me too, baby,” he said, letting his own tears fall.


	2. And Just Because I Call You Up, Don't Get it Wrong

            The Ravagers stared in silence. The clanging of equipment as everyone shifted their weight nervously sounded deafening even with the constant eruptions around them. Yondu swore viciously as he tried to call Peter again. And again. Peter had blocked him.        

            He tried calling Meredith, but he wasn’t picking up either. Inarticulate noises of rage escaped from behind his teeth. He grabbed Kraglin with so much unnecessary force it looked like he was about to frog march him to his death by geyser. “Put bounties on them. 40k each. Alive!”

            Kraglin nodded vigorously, probably in an attempt to get his captain to let him go. It was never fun being the closest thing for the captain to take his anger out on after one of his spats with Peter.

            “I told you when you picked that kid up we should have delivered him like we was hired to do! He was _cargo_!”

            Yondu’s hand unfisted from Kraglin’s jacket. He had found a new target. Yondu whistled, and now Peter and Yondu’s separation had a _casualty_. The captain’s mood was the kind of dangerous that would kill a crewmember that had served him loyally since before Peter over a conversational misstep. Okay, perhaps “epic fuckup” was more apt than “misstep”, but the punishment for being an idiot with no understanding of social cues wasn’t usually death, not even among Ravagers.

            They stood there, staring at the body while Yondu stalked off to the ship by himself, his coat billowing in the breeze that had picked up.

            “Come on, boys. Let’s get him to the ship,” Kraglin said.

            Though there was only one corpse, the ship felt like a cemetery haunted by a particularly vengeful devil. Everyone went about their duties as quietly as possible and no one dared vent their spleen of being deprived of a job, and their cut of the pay. The only noises besides the thrumming machinery of the ship was Yondu growling and swearing as he composed a text message to Meredith.

            Kraglin was the only witness to this, being the only one brave, dumb, or dedicated enough to deal with this. He sat a relatively safe distance away, putting the bounties up on Peter and Meredith.

            Having exhausted things to write to Meredith, Yondu leaned back in his chair. He took a flask out from somewhere deep in his coat and drained it all in one swallow.

            “Should have seen this comin’,” he said, probably to himself instead of Kraglin, wiping his mouth and upturning his flask. It was definitely empty.

            “Kraglin! ETA to the _Elector_!” he yelled, seemingly not aware that he was right behind him.

            “Fifteen minutes, sir.”

            “Fifteen minutes,” he muttered. He tried taking another swig of his flask, forgetting that it was empty. He tossed it in disgust. The sound of it clattering to the floor startled Kraglin into wincing.

            He picked it up and set it back on the table. Yondu put his feet up on the table and stared intently at a dark screen, waiting for it to come to life with a message for him.

            They sat like that for fifteen minutes. Kraglin had never been so glad to dock in his life. He eventually ventured a routine question as they boarded the _Elector_. “Where to, Captain?”

            “Xandar. If he’s lookin’ to sell that orb, that’s where to do it.”

            “Yes sir.”

            Kraglin took his place in charge in lieu of the captain, who was stalking off to his quarters, leaving a trail of frightened Ravagers in his wake.

            Kraglin seated himself in the captain’s chair. “Set a course for Xandar.”

            After a few minutes, someone eventually braved the question. “What’s eatin’ the captain?”

            “Peter and the kid. What else?”

***

            The captain’s quarters was the same as he left it. Rumpled bed, knickknacks strewn all over the place. Except for Peter’s bedside table. He had cleared it off, reverently placing them into the backpack they had originally come from. Yondu had asked him about it, the night before they had left.

            Meredith was already asleep in the middle of the bed, where he would proceed to kick his father in his sleep who knows how many times, waking him up until he rolled Meredith over so Peter was the target for his overactive feet. He figured that Peter had done the same at some point in the night, because he had woken up far too early with Meredith’s elbow digging into his ribs.

            “Where’s all your shit?” Yondu had asked, gesturing to the now bare bedside table.

            “Thought I’d take ‘em with me. Help decorate the place,” Peter had said, yawning. That son of bitch. He had been planning this for a while.

            Before that, he had walked in on Peter packing all of Meredith’s clothes and toys. That kid had way too much junk for a spacer. When you lived your life in the cramped quarters of a spaceship, you didn’t have much incentive or ability to accumulate a lot of stuff. Unfortunately, Peter and Yondu had both hoarding tendencies and the space to do it. “D’ya want the kitchen sink, too?” he had asked, idiot that he was for not putting two and two together.

            They had been in the middle of an argument, because Peter had just rolled his eyes.

            “You going to bring every damn thing the kid owns?” he had demanded.

            “Yes,” Peter had said, looking up at him defiantly while folding one of Meredith’s shirts and packing it up.

            “What the hell for?”

            He hadn’t said, “Because I’m leaving you.” He had said, “Because he goes through three fucking shirts and twelve fucking pairs of pants a day and the laundry is shit on the _Milano_! I’ll be doing laundry every damn day we’re out there!”

            “What about all this shit?” he had asked, picking one of Meredith’s stuffed animals up. Peter snatched it back, shoving it back into the trunk.

            “If I don’t want to hear him bitching and moaning the whole time because he only wanted what I didn’t bring, yeah!”

            “You spoil that boy something fierce. He doesn’t need no damn thing. He’ll get over it.”

            Peter had turned away from him. And packed all of Meredith’s clothes. And all of Meredith’s toys. And all of his stuff. And Yondu had walked them up the gangplank of the _Milano_. Meredith had kissed him goodbye. Peter had kissed him goodbye. Yondu had ignored the sadness in his eyes until now.

            There was a picture frame on the wall, displaying a new picture every thirty seconds. The one right now was of Meredith learning to walk, his mother’s hands holding him upright as Meredith smiled at the camera. Did he take that photo? He couldn’t recall.

            He went to the cabinet where he kept all the nice booze away from the crew’s greedy little paws, popped the top of something strong and started drinking. Between his liver and his heart, something was going to have to give.

            He stalked in mean little circles around the room, looking for something. All the furniture was bolted to the floor, and kicking it wouldn’t do anything but make the steel tips of his boots ring.

            He checked his messages. Nothing. Was Peter keeping Meredith from contacting him, or had he turned against him too?

            His mind threw up sounds and images of stern words and quelling glances. Before he had left, he had yelled at Meredith for repeatedly slamming the lid of his trunk while he was trying to make calls. There had been a real bust-up one time when he had caught Meredith almost literally pouring liquid soap down the drain. He had wondered where the heck all their soap was going, since he sure as hell wasn’t using that much of it. Turned out that Meredith had been pouring it onto the floor of the shower and swirling it around. While not pleased at the waste of perfectly good soap that he was paying for, Yondu was honestly more baffled than anything. Just…why, kid? He had absolutely no idea what went through that kid’s head most of the time. Who would even think to do that with soap? You just put it on and washed it off. Why the hell did he seem to think it was a toy to be played with? He felt the same way about Peter sometimes. He had no clue why he did what he did, but he had lived with him long enough to understand some causal relationships.

            Anyway, it wasn’t so much the soap but Meredith’s attitude that had earned him a whooping. Defiant, insubordinate, didn’t think that he should be punished at all. Peter wasn’t that way as a boy. Peter had been scared straight, as much as he liked to complain about it now. While he watched Meredith sniffle into his mother’s lap after his punishment, he thought that he was being too soft on the boy. Maybe he had been too soft on them both. But then why had they run away?

            Yondu’s knickknacks were mostly stolen. The best things in life are free, after all. Some of them were soft little things that ended up being requisitioned by Meredith. Some of them were beautiful and fragile and Yondu got on to Meredith about playing with them. Peter always rolled his eyes.

            “You’re like my grandma, only she had an entire room full of stuff I wasn’t supposed to touch. The no-no room. Why don’t you put them in a cabinet or something?”

            He liked them on his bedside table, Yondu insisted. So what if they were occasionally casualties of overenthusiastic sex, or the overenthusiastic product of sex. Meredith was attached to all of Daddy’s baubles as well, and was always tearful and apologetic when he broke one. Putting them away in a cabinet would make them different. Yondu didn’t have things that he didn’t use, even if their use was merely to be liked. Shoving all of his tchotchkes into a cabinet were you could only stare at them through glass meant that the things had value in an of themselves, not just because Yondu had taken a fancy to them.  

            He checked his messages again. Nothing. He wasn’t going to beg. He certainly wasn’t going to beg his _son_ for anything.

            He sat down on the bed. The bottle of booze was empty and there was a burning in his stomach. He threw the bottle at the wall, reflexively bringing his hand up to shield his face from the shards that flew towards him.

            This was not a silent affair. A stream of nigh incoherent rage poured from his lips, swinging his limbs heavily and dangerously as he cursed Peter, his ancestors, his sexual fidelity, and his character.

            He snatched up a little crystal glass thing, something that Peter swore up and down was an old-fashioned windmill, but Yondu had never seen such a thing. Cheap as hell, though he had still nicked it, somehow still beautiful. Maybe that made it better, that it wasn’t some great, precious, exclusive thing, but a common bit of beauty that you could hold in your hand. Yondu crushed it in his hand. Blood trickled out of his closed fist. He opened his palm and let the shards tumble out, some still stuck in his palm.

            He threw the next one. And the next one after that. And the rest of them. His table was as bare as Peter’s. The floor was not.

            All of Peter’s things were old. His bedside table was a little shrine to Terra. His lost home. His lost childhood.

            Yondu liked new things. Novelties instead of antiques. He wouldn’t feel bad about breaking them later. They had no value besides what he wanted to do them, and he wanted them destroyed.

            He turned over everything in the room that wasn’t bolted down. He worked himself into a blind enough rage that he wasn’t sure whether to smash or drink the rest of his liquor. Later, it would turn out that he smashed most of it, though he drank a lot.

            And even worse than the burning in his belly, the burning in his palm, was the burning in his chest whispering that he had gone wrong somewhere, and he didn’t know the course vector to put it back on track.

            He checked his messages. Nothing.


	3. Things are Going to Get Brighter

            The last time Peter had cried like this, his mother had died and he had been abducted by aliens. Like the previous time, it was not all sadness and fear. A sense of excitement buoyed him, preventing him from drowning in his tears. Before, it was because he thought his father had picked him up. Now, it was because he was free.

            He was left feeling hollow, but relieved at the expulsion. Like a really good shit.  He might have lost a few grets in water weight, but the emptiness was paradoxically full of promise. What was empty could be filled with something new.

            “Well, that’s over with,” he said, slapping his palms on his thighs. He at the food left half eaten on Meredith’s plate. He probably wouldn’t want the rest of it anytime soon, so Peter put it in the fridge.

            The front of the fridge had been shiny, reflective metal at some point, but the accumulated grime of a small child and a general lack of shipboard discipline had ended that quickly. Peter wiped a path clear, blackening his fingers to reveal his reflection. His eyes were still red and he hadn’t shaved for weeks. Meredith had commented on his burgeoning beard, but Peter had been thinking about going more femme now. Probably a breakup thing, but he couldn’t be arsed to shave lately.

            The door to the bedroom opened for Peter, revealing a room with a set of bunk beds bolted to the wall and not much else. Meredith was headphone-bedecked sniffling lump under the mess of blankets on the bottom bunk. The top bunk was currently occupied by Meredith’s junk, but they always slept in the same bed anyways. Peter even liked it sometimes.

            He sat down on the edge of the bed, looking at Meredith and having his heart broken all over again. It felt like one of the shard of his heart had lodged in his chest permanently, making it hurt to breathe. The speech he had prepared stuck in his throat. There was no way to soften “I’m taking you away from everything you’ve ever known and you will never go back.” Peter knew that from experience.

            So he removed the headphones and just gently rubbed Meredith’s back, mindful of the bruising, and sang. “Ooh child, things are going to get easier. Ooh, child…”

            Meredith broke into fresh sobs and threw off Peter’s hand.

            “Baby, I know you have a lot of questions. But you know I’ll always love you, right? Your daddy loves you too.”

            “But, but,” Meredith said, sucking up his snot and trying to master himself. “Am I ever going to see Daddy again?” The absolute brokenness in his voice made Peter’s body clench up in sympathy.

            “Oh, sweetheart, of course you will! You can still see Daddy. You just live with me now.”

            “Why can’t I live with Daddy?”

            “Because I won’t let you,” Peter said, firmly but sweetly. He could have ended his relationship with Yondu and kept up appearances on the _Elector_ for Meredith’s sake, but he didn’t want him to be raised by his father, plain and simple. Besides, he would never actually be able to end his relationship with Yondu if they were living on the same ship. Spacers were an notoriously incestuous lot. Peter had fucked his way through a considerable portion of the crew before Meredith had happened and he had settled down to something more substantial with Yondu. Peter knew that the minute he got bored, lonely, horny, or drunk, he’d cozy back up to Yondu like nothing had ever happened. Either Yondu would reject him, reminding Peter that they’d broken up, upsetting him, or Yondu would accept and Peter would be upset with himself come morning. No, he had to leave. As much as Peter would have liked to give Meredith a choice, as agonizing as it might be to choose between the two most important people in the world, he couldn’t.

            “What if Daddy comes and takes us back?”

            “He’s gonna try, but I’m not gonna let him.” That reminded him. “Has Daddy sent you a message yet?”

            Meredith startled, ducking his head and hesitating, but showed his mother the message. He worried a blanket in his fists as Peter read.

            _Meredith, what are your coordinates? I’ll pick you up._

            That must have taken a lot of self-restraint, Peter thought. He closed the message. “I know you love your father, and he loves you too, but you live me with me now, okay? I don’t want you going back there.”

            “But Daddy says that he raised you on the ship and you turned out fine.”

            Peter was taken aback. That was something Yondu threw at him in private whenever they had one of their depressingly regular disagreements about how Meredith should be raised. He hadn’t realized that Meredith had ever overheard.

            “How do you know I’m fine?” His voice came out tighter than expected, and Meredith immediately tried to hide half of his face with one of the blankets, looking away and shrugging his shoulders.

            “Baby…a ship like that is no place for a child,” he said in a softer voice.

            “Why?”

            A river of sounds and images flowed through Peter’s head, but he couldn’t catch them or fit them into something Meredith would understand. The sensation of his stomach dropping. The hiss of a blast leaving the barrel. The smell of charred flesh. Distant screaming. Peter wished that he was only a thief. He had tried to shield Meredith from most of what went on in a Ravager ship. Perhaps he had been too successful.

            “Listen to me,” Peter said, putting his hands on Meredith’s shoulders. “They’re not good people. Not even Daddy. They’re bad people. They do bad things, and I don’t want you growin’ up like that.” He hated how his voice started breaking at the end.

            “Daddy’s not bad!” Meredith protested instantly.

            “Not to you. No one’s bad to you. They’re too afraid of your daddy. But they would be, if you weren’t the captain’s kid.”

            Meredith’s eyes still looked doubtful. Peter knew that he had laid a lot on him.

            “Are you still hungry? Your food’s in the fridge.”

            “I’m not hungry,” Meredith said, getting back under the covers. Peter tucked him into his little blanket cocoon and pressed a kiss to his forehead.

            “I know this is hard, baby. I’m sorry.” The words rang hollow to even Peter’s ears. What comfort could he offer? What apology could he make?

            Peter left Meredith, wandering aimlessly through the ship. His music floated through the speakers. Though Meredith currently had the tape, he had clones on the ship. Somehow, he found himself at the helm leaning back in the pilot’s chair, staring up at the stars and listening to “Spirit in the Sky”.

            They were in deep space now, no celestial bodies for lightyears. Then they jumped into a busy shipping lane, the _Milano_ automatically slowing down and queuing for the jump point. Most of the ships were huge freighters, bigger even than the _Elector_ , though there were a few personal craft like the _Milano_. When next they jumped, it was into the gravitational field of a dwarf planet, but they broke free easily, heading toward the next point. For the first time in his life, he was free.

            A sense of exultation rose in him from pit of his stomach, lodging in his chest and expanding with his breath. Space! Constantly expanding. He could never reach the end of it, because there was no end. It just kept getting bigger and bigger, faster than light could catch up with it. How many billions of light years did the photons exuded by those distant stars travel to hit Peter’s eyes? He could go anywhere. Somewhere no one could find him. He could hide away for the rest of his days on a planet without any sentient life besides him and Meredith. The only two people in the world. He wasn’t going to, but he _could_.

            They were spacers. Peter didn’t know how to be anything else, and Meredith sure as hell didn’t. Even if he had wanted a terrestrial life, he didn’t think he knew how to do it. The only time he had been grounded in his adult life was the was the few years between his pregnancy until Meredith had been cleared for spaceflight, and it had been hell. Trapped in a lonely house on a desolate planet with a screaming baby. Whoever said space was bad for the brain had clearly never met Peter. Well, okay, maybe he wasn’t exactly that smart, but he had never been _diagnosed_ with anything while in space.

            He had thought about going back to Terra, though he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry about it. He had thought about going back more than he cared to admit, and it filled his stomach with a nauseating mixture of happiness and dread. What was he supposed to do, just park the _Milano_ in his grandparents’ backyard, knock on the door and say, “Surprise! It’s me, Peter! I got abducted by aliens, but I’m back. I had a bad breakup with the father of my child, can I chill here for a while? Yes, I know he’s blue. Yes, I know Meredith is a girl’s name, it doesn’t matter _in space—_ yes, I’m his mother.” If his grandparents weren’t already dead, he was pretty sure that would kill them.

            Yondu had always told him he couldn’t go home again, and those words had sunk in his heart like a stone, weighty with truth.

            “Why not?” Peter had demanded once, in his turbulent teenage years. It seemed like they had this conversation every couple of months since Peter had been with the Ravagers. This time, he was old enough for the answer to be different.

            “Listen, boy. Your home don’t exist no more.”

            “What?” Peter had cried, wondering if something had happened to Terra that he hadn’t heard about.

            They had just come off a job, and the booze was flowing on the ship. They weren’t too drunk yet, just enough to make this conversation easier.

            “I mean…” Yondu frowned and set his beer down, gesticulating vaguely. “…you ain’t Terran no more.”

            “Whaddya mean?” Peter cried, indignant.

            “You’ve lived most your life in space. You a spacer now, boy. If you go back, you’ll just be another alien. You think people down there are still singing your songs? Even if nothing’s changed since the day you left, _you’ve_ changed. You ain’t Terran no more, and they ain’t going to let you forget it.” Deep bitterness and anger twisted the words in Yondu’s mouth. He took another swig of his beer to wash out the taste. Peter stared into his own cup, letting Yondu’s words sink in, but he started up again.

            “I met your type before. Displaced. Trying desperately to hold on to every primitive thing you’ve lost. You can sing your songs, but you even remember what they mean? Did you ever know in the first place? No. You were just a child.”

            “Whose fault was that? I never asked to be abducted!” Peter said, his voice rising out of control until it rang out above the clamor of the party. It was silent for a few seconds while everyone watched Peter jump out of his chair and storm out of the room.

            He made a circuit of the entire ship, walking out his anger within the refuge of his headphones. Maybe he was drunker than he thought, because tears kept pressing at his eyes. But he knew it was the truth. He wasn’t Terran. Not anymore.

            He was a spacer. He had spent almost his entire life in artificial gravity, inches away from the cold kiss of the vacuum. He couldn’t take Meredith back to Terra. He couldn’t go back home again. For Meredith, home was the _Elector_. And Peter had just taken him away from it.

            First, they would go to Xandar. After that? Anywhere. He knew he’d need money for food, fuel, and the inevitable repair and maintenance of the _Milano_ , but he wasn’t worried about it now.  He had cleaned out their joint account, so they could coast for a while. Peter could keep taking jobs like this, on the edge of danger and the law. They would be all right.


	4. I Like to See You, But Then Again

            Even though Peter would probably be long gone, Yondu went to Xandar. Hopefully pressing the broker for whatever info he had wouldn’t be a complete waste of his time.

            It turned out to be worth his while. The orb was too hot for the broker to handle so Peter hadn’t been able to fence it.

            Just when the nice fellow was telling them about the buyer for this orb at arrowpoint, Yondu received a call. The arrow flew back into its holster as Yondu went outside to take it. Kraglin could handle it from here.

            He frowned when he saw the origin of the call, but he answered it anyways. It was an official Nova channel.

            It was finally Meredith. Yondu’s heart rose at the sight of him, but sank quickly when he took in the rest of the image. Meredith was shifting uncomfortably in a chair too big for him, a officer of the Nova Corps beside him. “Daddy? Can you come pick me up?”

            “Where are you, boy? Where’s your mama?”

            “Meredith Alayau Udonta and Peter Jason Quill are in Nova Corps custody. Your child will be released to you when you provide genetic evidence of relatedness or official adoption papers. Peter Quill will be transferred to the Kyln for his crimes against the Nova Empire,” the officer said.

            “I’ll be right over,” Yondu said. The call ended, and his fist slammed into the façade of the shop. Luckily for the broker, it was made of stone, so all Yondu had to show for it was new scrapes on his already-injured hand. This whole incident was turning out to be even worse than he anticipated.

            He went back into the shop and started divesting himself of his weaponry. He reached into his boots, pulling out his knives and handing them to Kraglin. He took them, not really sure where Yondu was going with this. The broker looked at the exchange like he was about to faint.

            “He’s heading to Knowhere,” Kraglin said.

            “No he ain’t,” Yondu said, digging the rest of his weaponry out of their various hiding places. “Got picked up by the Nova Corps.”

            “What about the orb?”

            “The Novans got it, but they don’t know it. It’ll be with the rest of Peter’s stuff in the Kyln. We’re just gonna hafta bust in there and get it.”

            The last thing Yondu removed was the belt that held his arrow. It hovered in the air for a few seconds as Yondu held it out to Kraglin before Kraglin took it reverently, lifting up his poncho and fastening it around his waist.

            Having ensured that he would be able to enter the holding facility, Yondu spared a last glance to the broker. His eyes were darting between Yondu and Kraglin, and his tongue flicked out to wet his lips. “How much did you say that little ditty was?” Yondu asked.

            Several thousand units lighter and a slightly heavier pocket later, Yondu arrived at the holding facility. It was made of the same blindingly white stone as the rest of the place, probably by city ordinance. It was only about three stories high, but long enough for a smallish transport ship to land on the roof for prisoner transfer. The Nova star blazed on the front of the building, and people hurried in or out of the building through the sunken plaza in front, where a fountain gushed unrelentingly.

            As soon as he stepped past the threshold, a small army of floating robots, small and eyeball shaped, started scanning him.

            “PLEASE HOLD STILL. SCAN IN PROGESS,” they chanted in their robot voices like a hellish chorus, except for one that said, “Please provide your hand or approximate appendage.” One of them was blinding him by scanning his retinas, another was circling his body and scanning, having started at his feet and worked its way up until it reached his pocket and let out a warning tone. “PLEASE DISCLOSE.”

            “It’s a toy,”” Yondu said, pulling out the thing he had bought from the broker. The robot scanned it again, deemed it no threat, and continued its scan. He put his hand in the iris portion of the robot that had asked for it, which was hollow for that purpose. After a small prick to take his blood, it joined the rest of the robots in a chorus of “SCAN COMPLETE. THANK YOU. PLEASE STATE THE PURPOSE OF YOUR VISIT.”

            “Here to pick up my kid.”

            “You wish to claim a minor?” It was just one of the robots speaking now. The rest of them joined the other swarms to interrogate everyone else who entered the building.

            “That’s right.”

            “You wish to claim MEREDITH ALAYAU UDONTA?”

            “That’s right.”

            “Please follow me.” The robot escorted him through the white labyrinth of the building.

            If Yondu would have had any charges pending against him, he would have had to resort to some rather extreme measures to reclaim Meredith. One of the perks of being the leader of a gang of criminals was that he got to delegate his dirty work. Somebody had to keep their nose clean so they could penetrate the bureaucracy, though he was sure that the second the Nova Corps had been alerted to his presence, they were trying to build a case against him since he was already at their mercy. He needed to get Meredith and get out of here, though he needed to see Peter too. He really did not like the Novans having all of his biodata. They must have upped their security procedures recently, what with all the terrorist attacks.

            The robot finally stopped and opened a door for him. Inside the room, there was a smattering of minors waiting on hard white chairs, shuffling loudly in the unusually profound silence for a room with a bunch of children. There was a wide range of ages, from a baby sleeping in an officer’s arms to a couple of teenagers slumped in their seats, arms crossed as they stared at their pads.

            Meredith had his head down, giving Yondu a good view of his orange headphones. He looked so much like his mother that for a moment Yondu’s mind superimposed the two images, disorienting him. He blinked, and the painful white of the room came back.

            Meredith looked up and his face was instantly transformed. “Daddy!” he cried, jumping out of his seat and running towards him. Yondu got on one knee to put himself level with Meredith and opened his arms. Meredith ran into him, throwing his arms around him tightly. “I missed you,” he said, his voice edging into tremulous.

            “I missed you too, runt,” Yondu said.

            After embracing for a moment, Yondu stood up, forcing Meredith to release his grip. He held out his hand for him though, and they threaded their way back to the exit. “I suppose you’re hungry.”

            “Yes!” Meredith said, his skips turning into a full body jump, with arms and everything, like this was the crowning moment of his life. Yondu chuckled.

            Before they left, there was a mind-numbing amount of forms to fill out. Meredith was in the chair next to him while he waited, though “sitting” a bit loose of a term for what he was doing. He was half off the chair, his leg hooked around the back and his head almost on the floor. Yondu didn’t feel like correcting him right now, just trying to fill out the damn forms and get out of there as quickly as possible.

            When he had finished, they went to the desk to pick up Meredith’s things. This was the first time they had spoken to an actual organism.

            Yondu wasn’t sure how the brat had convinced them to let him keep the Walkman. Probably because it was analog. The officer fixed Yondu with a stern look as she pushed the bin towards him. “Sir, there are laws restricting the use and possession of firearms by minors.”

            “That so?”

            When they left the building, the warm fuzzies of their reunion had started to fade. Meredith’s skipping and arm swinging slowed down and he looked up at his father.

            “Did you get hurt?” Meredith asked.

            At first, Yondu wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but then he saw Meredith looking at his bandaged hand.

            “It’s fine,” he said.

            They met back up with Kraglin and went to the first food joint that Yondu recognized. It was a cheap noodle place that he knew Meredith liked. While the outside was as blistering white as the rest of Xandar, inside it looked just like all of its sister restaurants in the rest of the galaxy. They placed their orders on the machine and a few second later, the little cubbyholes lit up and opened to disclose bowls filled with steaming hot noodles. They took their food and sat in a booth in the back. This place seemed to be popular with students, because half of the patrons were reading something with the sagging and harried look of scholars. They lethargically stirred their broth, not looking as they scooped their food up with various implements, a good portion of the slippery noodles inevitably sliding off. It was either that or shoveling their meal into their nutrition holes as fast as possible, ignoring the scalding.

            Meredith was quiet while he ate—at least on the talking front. He slurped his noodles mightily and with gusto.

            “Has your mother not been feeding you?” Yondu asked.

            “Mama cooked me breakfast today!”

            If Yondu had a hairline, he was sure that his eyebrows would be in it right now. “Cooked? Actual food? Your mother?”

            “Yep! It was good! We still eat a lot of ration packs, though.”

            While a lot of time spent on kitchen duty meant that Peter technically knew how to cook, he did not usually do it by himself. In fact, he was hardly capable of doing anything by himself without Yondu breathing down his neck except getting into trouble. Peter was the type that needed regimented disciple, else he fell apart. Though he hadn’t been away from the _Elector_ long, he was probably already unraveling.

            When Meredith finally started to slow down, Yondu asked him what had happened.

            Meredith wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and launched into his story. “We went to…uh, what was that planet called?”

            “Morag.”

            “We went to Morag. Mama didn’t want to let me come with, but then he said yes, so we went to go get the thingy, and it was all wet and rainy, and we got there and I was the lookout and I saw people coming! And they had guns and Mama talked with them and then we shot them—I shot and it hit them right in the chest! I was good! And then we ran back to the ship, but there were more aliens so we had to run to the ship real fast so we didn’t have time to buckle in so I fell and got hurt, but we got away. Then you called, and, and, and…”  So far, Meredith’s story had been all breathless excitement, but now he gripped his spoon in his fist and looked like he was about to burst into tears.

            “I know what happened, kid. What happened when you got to Xandar?”

            Meredith rubbed his eyes furiously. “We went to this store with the guy with the funny eyebrows but he yelled at Mama and didn’t want the thingy. Then we met a green lady who wanted the thingy and was going to give Mama two million units! And get me frozen yogurt! But Mama said no, so she kicked him and stole the thingy! So I had to wait at the fountain for Mama to get done fighting, but there was a tree! And a cute little animal, but it had a _gun_ and it was _mean_ and then the police showed up and they took me and Mama!” He was angry at that last part.

            It seemed like other people were already after the orb, and they’d probably go all the way to Kyln to get it. They might already be trying when it’s with the rest of Peter’s things at the detention center. Unless…

            “You don’t have the orb, do you? The thingy,” Yondu clarified.

            Meredith shook his head. “Mama got it back.”

            “I think it’s about time I had a talk with your mother.”

            After depositing their bowls and utensils to another cubby where they were whisked out of sight on a conveyor belt to be cleaned, they left, squinting as their eyes adjusted.

            “Go back to the ship,” Yondu told Kraglin.

            “Can we get frozen yogurt first?” Meredith piped up, grabbing his father’s hand.

            “I _just_ fed you!”

            “I still have room in my dessert belly,” Meredith said, rubbing his stomach. Yondu looked down at Meredith. Meredith looked up at Yondu, his eyes all big and pleading, his face all smiles. He was too damn much like his mother sometimes.

            “Go get the kid some yogurt,” Yondu said, giving in and gesticulating in a vaguely angry gesture. Meredith whooped and grabbed Kraglin, his new best friend, so hard that he listed to one side and all of his extra equipment jangled.

            Yondu had to go through the whole damn scanning procedure again, though it had hardly been a hour since he was last here. This time, he was here to see Peter.

            “SCAN COMPLETE. PLEASE STATE THE PURPOSE OF YOUR VISIT.”

            “Here to see a prisoner. Peter Quill.”

            “You wish to see PETER JASON QUILL, ALIAS SPACE-LORD?”

            Yondu snickered. “Yeah, sure. ‘Space-Lord.’ ”

            “Did I detect sarcasm?” the robot asked, awfully sassy itself.

            “Yes, I’m here to see Peter Quill.”

            “What is your relationship to the prisoner?”

            “Complicated.”

            “What is the purpose of your visit?”

            “Gonna yell at ‘im.”

            The robot was silent for some moments. “Transferring you to an officer. Please follow me.”

            “What is your relationship to the prisoner?” the Nova Corps officer asked, voice as rote as the question.

            “We have a kid together.”

            “Uh-huh. What is the purpose of your visit?”

            “Gonna yell at ‘im.”

            Apparently that was a good enough reason, because Yondu was currently being escorted by two officers to Peter’s cell.

            He glanced at the other prisoners as he walked by. Green lady, check. She was doing pushups on the floor of her cell and glared at him when their eyes met. Passing the next cell, Meredith’s tree comment finally made sense. There was some sort of arboreal life form sitting there, and in the next cell there was the animal.

            None of the others that he seen so far had been restrained in any way, the Nova Corps trusting in the plasma field barrier to keep them from escaping. Not so for this one. Not only did this animal have its hands—it had very definite hands, it weirded Yondu out a little bit—cuffed, but its feet as well, though loose enough that it could still shuffle around a bit. And the pièce de résistance was a collar around its neck, attached to a ring on the ceiling. Clearly this animal was considered a flight risk.

            “Didn’t know you was animal control too,” Yondu commented to the guards. The animal snarled at him as he passed.

            They finally reached Peter’s cell. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, his head in his hands. He didn’t look up when the guard temporarily dimmed the plasma field to let Yondu through.

            Yondu made a show of studying Peter’s cell even though he wasn’t looking. “Not a whole lot of space here, ‘Space-Lord.’ ”

            “Fuck you,” Peter said, but it was perfunctory and his voice was tired.

            “I didn’t tell them that this was a _conjugal_ visit, but if you insist…”

            “How’s Meredith?”

            “The kid’s fine. It’s _you_ that’s the problem. How long are you in for?”

            “Seven years. How long are their years, anyways?”

            “Beats me.”

            Peter finally looked up at Yondu, exhaling gustily and scrubbing his hands through his hair.

            “You costing me money, boy—” Yondu’s tirade was aborted by Peter suddenly laughing, mirthless and almost cruel.

            “You really gonna start that one up?”

            “How do you want me to start?” Yondu asked, advancing threateningly.

            “Hi, honey. It’s nice seeing you. I missed you,” Peter said, returning to his customary flippancy.

            “I thought we weren’t doing that anymore.”

            “I don’t think we ever did that in the first place.”

            “Don’t you even pretend that you never did any of that shit, because you did.”

            “Did you?” Peter threw back at him.

            “You’re damn lucky that orb is more valuable than your sorry ass, else I’d let you rot in the Kyln.”

            “It’s awfully hot. The broker wouldn’t take it off me and some chick tried to murder and/or rob me, and then this fucking tree shoved me in a bag!”

            Yondu couldn’t help but chuckle at that last part.

            “It wasn’t funny. It smelled horrendous and Meredith was scared.”

            “I think it’s funny that you thought you could steal from me and get away with it.”

            “I _would_ have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling kids and that dumb raccoon, too.”

            “No, you wouldn’t have. I will hunt you down to the ends of the universe to take back what’s mine.”

            “And what’s yours, huh?” Peter stood up and now Yondu had to look up in a way that was quickly giving him a crick in the neck. Terrans were too damn tall.

            “The orb is mine. The _Milano_ is mine. Meredith is mine. The clothes on your back are mine. _You_ are mine.”

            “That right?” Peter asked, his nostrils flaring in anger.

            “That’s right.”

            “Maybe there was a time when you could claim that you owned me, but not now. I’m not a kid anymore. You can’t force me into anything anymore.”

            “What have I been forcing you into, huh?” Yondu asked, throwing out his hands.

            Peter turned around, running his hands through his hair like he had an itch. “Nothing. Nothing in a long time.” He turned back to Yondu. “You planning on starting up again anytime soon?”

            “You can’t survive on your own, boy. You need me.”

            “Like hell I do!” Peter exploded.

            “Don’t seem like it to me,” Yondu said, his voice quiet and cold. “Seems to me that your little _adventure_ in single parenting landed you in the clink.”

            “This never would have happened if you hadn’t had put a bounty out on me!”

            “No, this never would have never happened if you hadn’t had taken it into that damn fool head of yours to leave!”

            “It’s always been in my head, Yondu! Always,” he repeated in a whisper.

***

            The frozen yogurt place was a sight cheerier than the other restaurant. Xandarian pop music serenated the small children of well-dressed parents distributing toppings on various flavors of neon colored frozen yogurt. After much deliberation, Meredith had finally selected his flavor and started running around the place, putting so many toppings on it obscured the yogurt. Kraglin didn’t care; Yondu was paying for it. (He might have been a little free-handed himself.)

            Meredith had bounced his way to a table, so Kraglin joined him. Meredith’s running monologue had not paused while he had flitted around the restaurant, so Kraglin was even more lost than before. Thankfully, his mouth was soon occupied and there was blessed silence, at least from this rugrat. Only now he was staring.

            He was looking, really looking at Kraglin, squinting his eyes at him and looking him up and down, evaluating. He looked like he wanted to ask a question.

            “What?”

            Meredith swirled his spoon around in his bowl, put it to his lips, and licked the back of it clean before saying, “Mama said you were a bad person.”

            “Did he?”

            Meredith nodded.

            Kraglin shrugged. “Well, he’s not wrong.”

            “He said you, and Daddy, and everyone was bad!” Meredith said, more heated.

            “Still not wrong.”

            “But! But, but but…” Meredith said, holding his head and shaking it in a childish gesture of confusion that amused Kraglin. “Is Mama bad too?” he asked, like the entire foundations of his existence were unraveling. Well, Kraglin guessed that they kinda were.

            “Eh, he’s not the worst of us. Not sure where he’s getting all this moral fiber from all of a sudden, though.”

            Meredith slumped into his seat. Then he looked up at Kraglin. “Mama’s in jail. I thought only bad people go to jail.”

            “I mean…people who commit crimes go to jail. Or, uh, people who have been convicted of crimes, because I guess you could get framed.”

            “Did Mama do a crime? What did he do?”

            Kraglin could recall a lot of crimes that Peter had committed, but he wasn’t sure which ones the Novans knew about. “Uh, lots of things I guess. Let me look it up. Uh, fraud, public intoxication, assault, illegal manipulation of a Gramosian duchess…huh, I thought that one got dropped. Kinda surprised there’s not more theft on here.”

            “What does all that mean?” Meredith asked, wide eyed.

            Kraglin was floundering. Explaining legal terminology to small children was not one of his strong points. It wasn’t even in his job description. “Well, uh, fraud is basically a really big lie. Public intoxication is being drunk in public, assault is fightin’, and uh, I’m not quite sure _what_ he did with that duchess.”

            Meredith’s hands were over his mouth, but Kraglin could still hear him say, “Those are really bad things! Right?”

            “Eh, not really. Still illegal, but not like, really bad.”   

            “What’s really bad?”

            “I don’t know…murder, I guess? When you kill someone. And there was that treason case that just got finished. Got himself executed. Treason is, uh…betraying the government? And, uh…I know there are more, but I can’t think of them right now.”

            “Have you ever done any of those things?” Meredith asked, his eyes as wide as saucers.

            “I’ve done all of those things, kid. Except that duchess thing. Was that blackmail? I’ve done that, but not with a duchess…and I haven’t done treason yet, I guess.”

            “Even murder?”

            “Especially murder. Lots of murder.”

            “Who did you murder?” Meredith asked, trying to whisper but not doing a very good job of it. It was all right though; none of the other children that was the majority of the patrons had a concept of whispering either.

            “Lots of people.” Kraglin scraped his spoon against his already empty cup of yogurt just for something to do. He had come here for frozen yogurt, not to have his entire life choices questioned.

            “I don’t think you’re that bad,” Meredith said, ducking his head and swirling his spoon around in his cup.

            “Uh, thanks? But you’d be wrong.”

            “Why?” The stare that Meredith was giving him was almost defiant, a look that his father would had smacked him for.

            Kraglin looked around the restaurant. Behind them, there was a toddler in a booster seat with just enough hand-eye coordination to be able to feed itself. The mother was attending to another child who was screaming about going to the park. It suddenly struck him that Meredith was actually _well-behaved_ for a child.

            Meredith was watching him curiously. Kraglin reached out his hand, and with the deliberateness and direct eye contact of a cat, knocked the toddler’s bowl of yogurt off the table. It spilled onto the floor, spreading into a sticky pink puddle. The child started crying, diverting attention from the one that was screaming.

            “Did you just knock your yogurt to the floor? You’re not getting any more!” the mother said, already whipped up into a towering fury by her other child. “Come on, we’re leaving!” She snatched both of them up, disregarding their screams and protests and slowly dragged the ruckus out of the building.

            Meredith’s hands were over his mouth and his eyes were wide. “That was mean!” he whispered.

            It was too much for Kraglin. He started cracking up. “I don’t know what your mama’s been tellin’ you,” he said in between bouts of mirth. “But it must be something real funny.”

***

            “Why now, then?” Yondu demanded.

            “Why now?” Peter was sitting back on the bed. He leaned back, putting his weight on his hands, and blew out a breath. “No real reason, I guess. Just something I’ve been thinking about.”

            “For how long?”

            “Since you abducted me. It waxes and wanes.”

            Yondu supposed that escape was a natural desire for an abductee, but Peter had become much more than that. He had become a full-fledged Ravager. He had become Yondu’s partner.

            They were silent for some moments before Peter sighed. “If you want me to explain myself…it’s kind of hard, actually. I’ve been thinking it over for a long time and I’m still not clear on a lot of things. You know, we’ve been together since I was about Meredith’s age. Well, not _together_ together, but still. You’re basically raised me and now we have a kid together. I’ve never been able to get away from you my whole life.”

            “You shoulda worked this shit out when you were a teenager instead of trying to fuck me. You’re not a kid anymore. You _have_ a kid, and he’s mighty upset that you took him away from his daddy.”

            “Yeah, well, he’ll get over it,” Peter said, mocking the words Yondu frequently used.

            “It’s _you_ he’s going to have to get over.”

            “Hey, I was going to bring Meredith over sometimes. I want him to see you. I don’t want him having daddy issues.”

            “Like you?”

            Peter sighed. “Like me.”

            “Your issues are the whole reason we’re in this mess. If I had known we were going to be fucking, I would have raised you better.”

            Peter chuckled, laying down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. “Why did you never do it?”

            Even though Yondu knew what Peter was talking about, he said, “Why didn’t I do what?”

            “Take me to my father. You know, for a long time I thought that was just a story you had made up to placate me, but then everyone else said it was true. Did the deal go bad? I figured you would have said it if it did, but nobody knows. Why did you keep me?”

            “You were skinny. Could fit into places we couldn’t. Good for thievin’.”

            “Don’t even give me that bullshit, Yondu. What’s the real reason?”

            “Same reason I keep all that other useless junk. I liked it, so I took it.”

            “You threaten to eat everyone you like, huh?”

            “Pretty much.”

            Peter laughed. “I still love you, you know. Though I think I’d love you even more if you lived very far away.”

            “What are you going to do when I pick you up?”

            “What are _you_ going to do when you pick me up? You just going to throw me in the brig, or are you going to lock me in your quarters and pretend nothing ever happened? Because Meredith won’t forget.”

            “First I’m going to beat you within an inch of your life for insubordination, betrayal, and stealing from me. Then I’ll tell you the same damn thing I’ve told you your whole life. As soon as you pay your debts…you’re free to go.”

            Peter’s smile was radiant. “Ah, yes. Good ol’ indentured servitude. What about Meredith?”

            “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”

            “How much do I owe now?”

            “You’re already over 100k, so you’d better make yourself at home.”

            Peter gave him a little grin. “Will do.”

            A guard informed them that their time was up. Peter got off the bed and Yondu watched his hips sway as he walked towards him and embraced him, kissing him so deeply it was almost a mindwipe. When Peter broke away, Yondu was disoriented, having forgotten where he was and what he was doing.

            “Bye. Tell Meredith I’ll see him soon, okay?” Peter said with a little wave as the guards escorted Yondu out of his cell.

            That brief reprieve from hating Peter had only made him madder as he walked back, stewing over a lot of things that had gotten tangled in his mind.

            “Hey, Yondu!” someone called, saying his name like it was an insult.

            Yondu turned around and looked at the origin of the voice. It was that little animal, as close to the plasma field as his restraints allowed. “You owe me money.”

             Yondu felt pretty sure that he’d recall something like that. “Don’t believe I do.”

            “Yes you do. 40k. How’s Meredith?”

            So the animal was a bounty hunter. “I ordered delivery, not pickup,” Yondu said.

            “You still got it, didn’t you?”

            Yondu watched the guards eye the thing warily, hands close to their guns. He looked again at the three different restraints that tethered it. Looks like he was a better escape artist than a bounty hunter.

            “Tell you what. I’ll transfer you 10k, and if you do it right I’ll give you the other forty thousand. Deal?”

            The animal smiled. Yondu knew a bit about animals, and he knew that they didn’t smile like people did. In non-sapient species, the baring of teeth was either a threat or a sign of submission, not something happy or mirthful. The expression it was giving Yondu was the former. “Deal.”

            The guards hurried him along after that, possibly afraid that he’d make more deals with talking animals. Yondu was finally expelled into the cavernous lobby, and he sent a message to Kraglin telling him he was on his way.


	5. Girl, You Got Me Thirsty for Another Cup of Wine

            The patiently strained look on Kraglin’s face that greeted him when Yondu boarded his ship lightened his mood somewhat.

            “But why?” Meredith was asking.

            “Hey, runt. I’m back,” Yondu said, rescuing Kraglin.

            “Daddy!” Meredith ran up to him and hugged him. He still hugged him so tight, as if it would be the last time he would get the chance.

            “Did I show you what I got?” Yondu asked, kneeling down.

            “No.”

            With a flourish, Yondu produced the trinket he had bought off the broker.

            “Let me see!” Meredith said, grabbing it. It was made of precious stones, so it wasn’t like Meredith could break it, so Yondu let him hold it. Meredith held it up to the light, turning it over so the light shone on different facets of the jewel. “Cool.”

            “Did you have fun?”

            “Yeah,” Meredith said noncommittally at the same time Kraglin shook his head vigorously. Yondu laughed.

             Meredith fell asleep as soon as they left the atmosphere, curled up on Yondu’s lap with the trinket still clutched in his hands. Yondu gently pried it out of his hands and set it on the console.

            “So we bustin’ Peter out?” Kraglin asked.

            “Not unless we have to. Got someone on the inside gonna turn him in for the bounty. Cheaper and less hassle than trying to do it ourselves, if he pulls through. The only problem is that Ronan. If he’d not willing to pay as much for it as this other guy is, he’s gonna try to take it by force. He ain’t got much of an army, but more than I want to tangle with. This is all Peter’s fucking fault. Shoulda let y’all eat him when I had the chance,” Yondu grumbled.

            Meredith didn’t stir when Yondu picked him up and carried him to their quarters. The _Elector_ was still on its day cycle, so Yondu hoped that he was tired enough to sleep through the night and wake up at a reasonable time. He was going to give Peter extra lashes when he came back if he had to get Meredith back on a sleep schedule.

            He was still asleep when Yondu’s shift ended and he got into bed, but in the wee hours of the morning Yondu was awoken by Meredith stirring about.

            Seeing he was awake, Meredith asked, “Daddy, can I play my game?”

            “Yes. But you better be up and ready when you’re supposed to.” He rolled over and went back to sleep. He woke up at his usual time to find Meredith playing his game on his pad while listening to the Walkman.

            “Are you ready?” Yondu demanded, startling his son.

            “I took a shower, but I don’t have any clothes! All my stuff is on Mama’s ship!”

            “Fuck, that’s right,” Yondu said, running his hand over his face. He had forgotten not to swear in front of Meredith. He had just woken up, give him a break. That rat had better bring Peter, the _Milano_ , the orb, and all that other shit back soon. “You can wear them another day.”

            “I think I’m going to have a birthday soon,” Meredith said. “Or maybe a Christmas.”

            “What makes you think that?”

            “There was a present in Mama’s backpack!”

            “That old thing? He’s had that thing since I picked him up. It’s not for you.”

            “Why hasn’t he opened it, then?” Meredith asked, sulking a bit that the present wasn’t for him.

            “Fu—he—I don’t know,” Yondu said.

            “Do you think he’ll let me open it?”

            “No.”

            Yondu stumbled into the bathroom, sleep still a weight on his limbs. He slept better when Meredith and Peter were in bed with him, though certainly not longer. Really, he felt like it should be the opposite. He was a light sleeper when he wasn’t knocked out in a drunken stupor. He had never had the chance to be anything else. Maybe something inside of him was soothed by the presence of his mate and child in arm’s reach—though if it was guarding instinct, wouldn’t it make him a lighter sleeper? Yondu didn’t pretend to understand whatever this was.

            The bathroom looked terribly bare without all of Peter’s crap piled precariously on every available surface. The bareness made every piece of glitter and stray hair stubbornly remaining stand out in stark relief. When Peter came back, Yondu was going to make him do a full quarantine clean on this place. He hadn’t had long hair in a while, but somehow strands found their way onto Yondu weekly.

            After showering, Yondu went back into the bedroom naked and got dressed. His daily ablutions complete, he turned his attention to his son. Meredith was standing loosely at attention, his arms behind his back and wiggling. He looked almost shy for some reason, and it stung. They hadn’t been separated for that long, but there was something different in the air between them. What had Peter put in that damn foolish head of his?

            “What did your mama tell you?” Yondu asked.

            Meredith looked simultaneously guilty and relieved. “He said that you’re all bad people!” The distress was obvious in Meredith’s voice and demeanor.

            Yondu snorted. “Your mama ain’t one to talk. He’s been a Ravager for years now, doin’ the same sh—stuff we do.”

            Maybe he hadn’t smacked Peter around enough as a kid. Or maybe he had smacked him too much and the reason Peter had started thinking he was too _good_ for the Ravagers was because of the brain damage. Brain damage would explain a whole fucking lot about Peter, but the doctors had always said it was just his neural wiring.

            There had always been that little spark of light inside of Peter, as much as Yondu had tried to quash it. Peter had never taken delight in wielding power or violence like the rest of the crew. He couldn’t watch when they did, and even when Yondu made him, he could see it in his eyes that it made him sick. Peter was _soft_. And nothing that Yondu had ever done—maybe could ever do—would make him hard. He’d break before that, and somehow, Yondu didn’t want Peter broken. Maybe he was soft too.

            “And now he’s in jail, which is where bad people go! I don’t…I don’t get it.” Meredith was fighting off tears now. He knew his father didn’t tolerate tears.

            “Everyone’s f—frickin’ bad, Meredith. Ain’t no one good. Maybe we’re worse than most, but we ain’t pretending like your mama is.”

            “Mama says being good is a choice, and that it’s a constant struggle to do right.”

            Yondu just stared. Where the hell was Peter getting all this? Out of some damn book? Did he fancy himself a _philosopher_ now? He sure as hell hadn’t gotten it from Yondu, who was reprehensible even by Ravager standards.

            “And does your mama do right? No! Do you—” The bell warning them that a shift change was coming up rang, cutting Yondu off. “Let’s eat,” he finished instead, gesturing angrily to the door. Meredith was out like a shot, as glad as Yondu was that this conversation was over.        

            Yondu spent the meal mentally calculating how many extra lashes Peter was going to get for putting him through this, and the “grief and aggravation” fees he was going to tack on to his debt. He would show Peter just how bad he could be.

            Meredith was as much of a bottomless pit as he always was, though much less of a chatterbox. He hardly said a word. Yondu ate mechanically, so that by the time he had finished he had no idea what he had consumed, an advantage in this canteen. The bell for the shift change rang, and Meredith scampered off back to the captain’s quarters to do his schoolwork while Yondu headed to the bridge.

            After making his rounds to make sure that everything was running smoothly, he returned to his quarters. They were staying close to the Kyln in case any number of things happened. Peter getting out. Peter not getting out. Ronan coming for the orb. They were just playing it by ear now.

            Just as he had suspected, his inbox was full of messages from people who wanted to hire him and his crew, breaking their dry spell. Of course they couldn’t do a damn one of them before this whole orb thing blew over, and half of them were time sensitive.  Yondu was adding opportunity costs to Peter’s invoice when Meredith let out a whoop, prompting Yondu to look over.

            He had only marginally kept up with what Meredith was studying. Peter had taken it upon himself to make sure that Meredith was educated, possibly to patch up the holes in his own learning. All the education Yondu had given Peter was a certificate from the school of hard knocks, though it was indisputable that Ravager skills were valuable. Hell, it wasn’t like Yondu had had any schoolin’, and he wasn’t hurtin’ from it.

            He had figured that the process was a bit quieter, though. Meredith was making noises of jubilation or despair far too melodramatic for whatever the hell it was he was doing. Yondu leaned over to look. Multiplication. Meredith caught his father looking at him, so he looked up and smiled now that he had captured his attention.

            “Daddy, do you know how to do multiplication?”

            “Sure do.”

            “Does Mama?”

            “I hope so. Least I taught him to, anyways.”

            “It’s easy! All you gotta do is remember, and if you don’t, you can think of one you know and add or subtract more numbers!”

            “Uh huh,” Yondu said.

            Having inflated Peter’s debt to an insurmountable sum, the next thing on his to-do list was to look up this Ronan fella. The estimates of his military capacities weren’t enough to threaten Xandar, which was why his little band of ideologues had mainly confined themselves to terrorist activities. He had surprisingly good materiel, plus the support of Thanos, but his band of rabble wasn’t enough to give Yondu’s Ravagers a run for their money. Paramilitary forces were only effective as their leader, and while Yondu was sure that the Accuser was a rousing speaker and a formidable fighter, he let ideology get in the way of strategy. He was trying to score philosophical points instead of win the war he had declared.

            Of course, the looming question was what exactly the orb contained, and why Ronan wanted it. Thus, how much he would pay to get it. He seemed to have some pretty deep pockets, probably secretly funded by the Kree government in defiance of the peace treaty. Of course, they’d have to get to it before he did.

            But before that, Yondu had to do something about his crew. His little…outburst had decreased his standing with them. With the louts that he had, he couldn’t give them an inch, because they would take a mile and he’d have a mutiny on his hands. Memories weren’t that long, though. Whether because of the frequent head injuries, inebriation, or just lack of brainpower in general, they would invade some pleasure district on a planet only a few jumps away from the Kyln and all sedition would be cheerfully forgotten.

            He wasn’t too familiar with this part of the galaxy, so after some consultation with the incomparable _Jhenni’s Guide to a Galaxy of Gratification_ , sauciest rag in the galaxy, he decided where they were heading. Now to go and bully the crew around so they didn’t forget who was the boss.

            He spared a last glance to Meredith, still far too emotionally invested in multiplication. What was he going to do with him while they were on shore leave? Because Yondu was planning on getting blackout drunk and having Kraglin drag his unconscious ass back to the ship. _He_ needed a babysitter, so what the hell was he going to do with Meredith?

            He had always just taken young Peter with the rest of the crew. He had been fascinated by the prostitutes, entranced by the way they walked. The way they danced. How they sweet talked their marks. At the time, Yondu had interpreted that as nascent sexual interest and guffawed, but when Peter got older and his sex changed, it turned out Peter was more interested in _being_ a prostitute than fucking one. He wondered if something inside of Peter had known, like a caterpillar staring up at a butterfly. If it had, it sure as hell hadn’t communicated that fact with the rest of him.

            There had been a lot of crying the first time it had happened. Yondu had just assumed that it was because Peter was a girl now and that was what girls did, but then he was informed that Peter had no idea that this would happen. He supposed a surprise sex change would upset a lot of people, but Peter definitely got used to it.

            Dammit, thinking about these things was supposed to be Peter’s job. Yondu’s job was thinking about how they could steal shit, beat people up, and make money. This single parenting thing was shit.

            Peter usually had Meredith under his constant supervision, hidden away in the captain’s quarters except for meals and chores. He knew firsthand what some of the crew members did to children when they thought they could get away with it. Yondu didn’t trust most of his crew with children, and he counted himself among that number. Who the hell had let him reproduce? He should have gotten snipped way earlier. “Better late than never” was not a phrase that applied to contraception.

            He supposed that he would just bring Meredith along and hope that he didn’t turn out to be as much of a whore as his mama.

***

            Yondu led his rabble to the red light district like he was a teacher and they were a bunch of oversexed kindergarteners on a field trip. The actual child of the group was better behaved, walking next to Yondu and taking in all the sights with wide eyes. They had arrived during the planet’s day cycle, so the teeming city, brightly painted with a sweet smell in the air from fragrant blossoms, was on full display.

            He had never gone out with the rest of the crew on shore leave. His mother had always planned something else for them to do, even though he always complained about having to watch the baby while everyone else was drinking and having fun. Yondu always asked him who else was supposed to watch the baby, and that shut him right up.

            It had been a long time since Yondu had been with the crew on shore leave as well, something that doubtless had decreased his store of goodwill with the crew. There was no use paying for extra pussy when the one he was already paying through the nose for always complained that they weren’t having enough sex and that he didn’t spend enough time with Meredith. Somehow shore leave had transformed from a bacchanalian orgy into family time, and somehow Yondu hadn’t minded.

            Aliens of varying genitalia and states of undress posed in the big picture windows of the establishments. They all looked organic, though, and Yondu had had just about enough of real people. Where were all the robots? He scanned the street, but none of the large neon signs advertised robots, though one advertised sexual cannibalism.

            “Is everything here biological?” Yondu asked. He hadn’t addressed it to any particular person, but one of the ever-helpful hookers whose job it was to stand out on the street and lure customers in piped up.

            “Sure is! The union drove out all of those nasty clanks. You know how often those things are cleaned and maintained? How often they _malfunction?_ How easily they’re hacked? Biologicals don’t have those problems!”

            “Y’all got plenty of other problems,” Yondu said. Though he had encountered his fair share of janky sexbots, they were less messy than their biological counterparts and he didn’t want himself or his crew in any sort of mess. Jhenni had apparently neglected to update the guide with this information. This was not how Yondu wanted to spend his time, though he was sure the crew wouldn’t have any complaints.

            Then she saw Meredith. “Awww, it’s a baby!” she squealed, more enthusiastic than she had probably been for any customer. “Look Suyy, look! A baby!” she said, calling her compatriot over.

             “I’m not a baby!” Meredith said, folding his arms in front of him.

            “Of course you’re not, sweetie! How old are you?” she asked.

            He looked up at Yondu. “Umm, I think I’m seven?”

            “Such a charming little man!” the one called Suyy said, bending over and exposing her generous cleavage. She looked up at Yondu. “This going to be the little man’s first time?”

            “I don’t think he’s that interested,” Yondu said.           

            “Interested in what?” Meredith asked.

            Suyy and the other hooker laughed. “Aww! You’re so cute! How about you and your daddy and his friends come inside and have a drink? We have milkshakes!”

            “Milkshakes!” Meredith said, tugging excitedly at his father’s coat. “Can we? Can we?”

            “Sure,” Yondu said. Meredith cheered and ran into the brothel. Yondu guessed that Meredith’s choice was as good as any, so he followed and so did the rest of the Ravagers.

            Seated in a booth in the downstairs bar part of the establishment with something substantially stronger than a milkshake, Yondu realized that he didn’t even like any of this shit. Well, he liked drinking, but he could do that anywhere. Especially places where the music wasn’t pounding and hookers were screeching and drunken idiots were laughing.

            They were seated in a large semicircle, the prostitutes interspersed between the Ravagers except for Meredith sitting next to Yondu. Suyy was sitting next to Meredith, and the one that Yondu had picked out, some large-hipped orange girl, was on his other side, but he wasn’t really feeling it. The smarter Ravagers were sitting in Yondu’s inner circle, both because it was always a smart idea to be close to the captain, but mainly because Meredith was an absolute chick magnet. It seemed like everyone in the damn building stopped by their table to coo at Meredith, who was basking in all the attention. It also made him very hyper, and Yondu wasn’t sure if he was too drunk or not drunk enough to deal with him, though Suyy was doing a pretty good job of keeping him entertained.

            “He get all that cute from you or his mama?” the one Yondu had picked out—Usha, he thought it was—asked him in a low, seductive voice, looking up at him from a lowered head.

            Yondu chuckled, turning his face towards her so she could get a good look at him. The lighting was low, but she wasn’t blind. “His mama.”

            “Where is your mama, sweetie? How come you’re here?” Suyy asked Meredith. That dampened his mood significantly.

            “In jail,” Meredith said morosely.

            “Aww, how awful! Come here, baby,” she said, hugging him close and practically smothering him with her breasts. That was about how Peter hugged him though, so Yondu supposed that he was used to it.

            “Brought him in case I needed his liver after tonight,” Yondu said.

            “I’ll give you my liver, Daddy!” Meredith said, considerably more sanguine than he probably should be about donating his organs. The table erupted into laughter, which confused him. “What is a liver, anyways?” he added, and everyone started cracking up again.

            “It’s one of your organs,” Yondu said.

            “Oh. Why do you need one of my organs?”

            “I don’t, kid. It was a joke. We’re probably not compatible anyways.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “I mean, I can’t put your organs in my body because it’ll make me sick.”

            “Oh! Where is my liver?” Meredith asked, lifting up his shirt.

            “Right here,” Yondu said, pointing to it. He shook his head and went back to his booze after this impromptu anatomy lesson. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Usha looking at him with something approaching genuine interest. Yondu got so much more sexual attention when he was out with Meredith. Women liked a man who was already broken in.

            “Do you miss her?” Usha whispered, her neon green painted lips brushing his ear softly. It took him a second to realize she meant Peter, which he hoped meant that he had reached a good level of drunk.

            “Him. He’s one of those hermaphrodites.”

            “You want one? We got some of those here.”

            “No. I don’t even like ‘em. Peter’s a…what’s the word? He switches, back and forth,” he said, waving his hand. “Kraglin. What’s Peter?”

            Temporarily distracted from his girl, Kraglin said, “Uh, a jackass?”

            “The sex thing.”

            “A slut?”

            “The thing with the genitals.”

            “Hermaphrodite.”

            “I got that part, but there’s a special word for it.”

            “Sequential hermaphrodite,” Meredith piped up.

            “That’s the one,” Yondu said.

            “Aww, cute and smart too! Everyone’s going to be all over you when you grow up,” Usha said.

            “Mama says I can be whatever I want when I grow up, a boy or a girl! Or both!”

            “Yeah, we’ll get you an implant so you can be whatever,” Yondu said, motioning for Usha to refill his glass. That finished the bottle. “Keep it coming,” he told her.

            “Yes sir,” she said chirpily, giving him a mock salute as she ordered another bottle. She probably got some commission.

            “Daddy, I’m hungry,” Meredith said.

            “We have ice cream!” Suyy said.

            Meredith gasped excitedly and turned to his father, all excited smiles.

            “Didn’t you just have a milkshake? Whatever. I don’t even care anymore,” Yondu said.

            “What kind do you want, sweetie?” Suyy asked, tapping the order screen on the able.

            “Orange! Orange!”

            “I didn’t know they had ice cream here,” Kraglin said. After a pause, he gave into his sweet tooth and ordered some for himself.

            “I don’t usually go to whorehouses for their ice cream selections,” Yondu said dryly.

            “That’s true!” Kraglin said, laughing and wrapping his arms around his girl, squeezing her. She laughed and rubbed his thigh.

            The waitress brought the ice cream to the table, and Meredith dug in happily. Yondu had a vague inkling that he probably should feed the kid real food at some point, but that thought drifted away when Usha started stroking his thigh.

            He didn’t look at her. Truth be told, he was hoping to blow straight past sex and into the whiskey dick and drunk snoring stage. He was done with anyone with a vagina for a while. For the rest of his life, possibly. Among the many and varied things that Peter had ruined for him—chocolate, binary star explosions, the ending to _Anthems of Agony in Allibfe_ —Yondu was probably most upset that he had ruined sex. Sex was a perfectly good thing that Peter had ruined by too much of. Fuck, was he needy. He heard that it was a hermaphrodite thing, something something hormones yadda yadda. What it meant was that Peter wanted sex every day. Yondu hadn’t realized that he didn’t until he was expected to.

            When Kraglin had been the first victim of a teenaged and freshly invaginated Peter, it had been the funniest goddamn thing to happen since they had acquired the little Terran brat. The haunted look in Kraglin’s eyes—or was it hunted?—and the stories he vented to an incredibly amused Yondu was a perpetual source of hilarity. Peter came from one of those lovey-dovey high touch cultures, so there was not a minute where they were in the same room that Peter was not somehow bodily attached to Kraglin, who looked nothing more than that he would like to gnaw the connecting appendage off.

            “Why don’t you push her away?” Yondu had asked when Peter had been ordered out of earshot.

            Kraglin had winced a little and said, “I mean, the sex is still good.”

            One thing Yondu had never understood was how a guy like Kraglin, or any other member of his crew, changed so goddamn much around women. It was almost exclusively women. There were probably some complex sociological factors in play here that Yondu was not aware of, but the fact was that being romantically entangled meant that you showed a whole new side of yourself to someone for most people. While Kraglin would ordinarily think nothing of removing any appendage he had didn’t want touching him with extreme violence, he bore Peter with silent suffering in his eyes and only complained about it later.

            “Is whatever Peter got contagious? ‘Cause you sure are being a pussy,” Yondu had said when he had gotten roped into a bitching session while he wasn’t in the mood. “If you don’t like what she’s doing, fix it!”

            “You say that like it’s easy.”

            “It is, boy. You’re just too chickenshit to do it.”

            Yondu saw Kraglin think about throwing his own lack of experience in romantic entanglements at him, but apparently Peter hadn’t yet sucked all of his brains out by his dick because he thought better of it. “I don’t know,” he had said instead. “It’s like…when it’s happening it’s not that bad, but when she leaves it’s like, what the fuck just happened? It’s like she put a spell on me, or somethin’. I don’t know.”

            “Well then, prepare to be enchanted. Here she comes.”

            Peter had just entered the mess hall, scanning the tables for Kraglin. She saw him and bounded over, her breasts heaving and threatening to smack her in the face, so she had to slow down. To celebrate finally going on jobs and having money now, she had bought some hormones and she had been slinging her super-titties at everyone she thought might fancy them, and everyone else because hey, why not?

            She bounded into Kraglin’s lap, sitting sideways and throwing her arms around his neck and kissing his cheek.

            “Hey Petey,” he said, trying to shove one last forkful of food into his mouth before she started smothering him with her breasts. He did not succeed.

            “Hey Kraglin,” Peter said, but her eyes were on Yondu. She was giving him a sly sort of look that said, _this could be you_ , and Yondu was giving her a look that said _haha no_.

            Kraglin’s renewed attempts to feed himself were in vain as Peter redirected his fork to her mouth, which prompted an expression so piteous from Kraglin that Yondu laughed aloud.

            “What’s so funny?” Peter demanded, something she did often nowadays.

            “Let the poor boy eat,” Yondu said.

            “No? He already ate.”

            “I don’t think he was finished,” he said, dry amusement coloring his voice.

            Peter pouted, but gave control of the fork back to Kraglin, who started to shovel the last little bit of his food into his mouth like he was starving.

            Peter had been young enough then that she was more often taken for Kraglin’s little sister than his girlfriend. Acted like it too.

            Peter had been trying to sink his little claws into Yondu since his first girl stage when he was so femme that he switched pronouns. It had provided some useful insight into females even if Peter wasn’t one all the time. Before they had been living together—even before any of the false starts on that front—Yondu had ended up letting Peter use his bathroom for his arcane rituals of female transformation so he wasn’t hogging the communal ones. He had heard it said that knowing how sausage was made made it less appetizing—it didn’t affect his opinion of sausage, but it worked for women.

            He had leaned on the doorframe and watched Peter, naked at least from the waist up, while she—and even into his he phases—applied cosmetics and cleverly altered their body to fit whatever standards of beauty that Peter was trying to achieve that day. One thing that frustrated Peter endlessly was that there was no galactic consensus on what was beautiful. It was all incredibly cultural, and half the time there was no way for Peter’s body to ever achieve it, so he just had to wing it and hope his winning personality would be enough seduction. Often enough, it was.

            “What are you doing?” Yondu had asked once, seeing what the hell was taking Peter so long. He had to piss.

            “Okay, so there’s this thing where you put in glittery hair extensions in your hair, and there’s _also_ a thing where you paint these zig-zag stripes on your hair, so I thought, hey, why not do both! And now I regret it. Hand me the bottle of color remover.”

            “Uh huh,” Yondu said, surveying the monstrosity that was Peter’s hair. He was ashamed to say that he knew exactly which bottle the color remover was in, even though the lettering had faded after long use. He also knew that when Peter tried to get it out herself she never did a thorough enough job with it, color lingering in her hair for days, so he decided he was going to do it right the first time so she wouldn’t have any excuses to further monopolize his bathroom.

            Peter’s hair had gotten long, all the way down to her butt now. It felt nice and smooth in his hands as he ran his fingers through it, erasing the teal stripes she had painted on. So that conditioning whatever she had been nattering on about worked, because the last time he had touched her hair it felt like dry straw. While he was doing that, Peter was taking out her hair extensions so they would be spared the wrath of the color remover.

            It took him three passes to finally restore Peter’s hair to its original state, during which Peter had decided to not waste time and apply her makeup. Yondu liked watching that part, the same way he liked watching something that might bite him. Sometimes he hardly recognized the ashy faced little boy he had picked up in whatever Peter’s face was now.

            “Done,” Yondu announced. In response, Peter swiveled around on the stool so that her back was facing the sink, settling her hair in it. She was still doing something with her eyes aided by a handheld mirror.

            “What, you want me to wash it too?” Yondu grumbled.

            “All you gotta do is run water over it and make sure none of it gets in my face,” Peter said, blithely assuming that Yondu would be willing to do such a thing.

            As it turned out, he was, though he grumbled the whole time. But now Peter had sopping wet hair that would take forever to dry, and the entire reason Yondu was here in the first place was to tell Peter to hurry up, so now he had to blow dry her hair. Yondu was left with the distinct impression that he had somehow been bamboozled with nary a word from Peter. The bitch wasn’t even dressed yet, getting her vagina cooties all on the stool. Though to be fair, it was only Peter who used that stool. What the hell did Yondu need a stool for?

            “Why the hell can’t you do this with Kraglin?”

            “It’s not his shift yet. He’s sleeping.”

            “You think I don’t have better things to do than be your hairdresser?”

            “Apparently not,” Peter said, smacking her freshly painted lips.

            Yondu smacked the back of her head. She squealed and jumped off of the stool. She recovered quickly though, and sauntered back into the bedroom. Yondu couldn’t help but stare at the sway of her hips. Yeah, that made all this worthwhile. She turned her head around and peeked back at him, smiling knowingly. He tried to pretend that he hadn’t been looking, but he didn’t think that it worked.

            “Hey, hey, hey! Do you know what six times six is? I do!” Meredith said, his voice cutting through Yondu’s reverie.

            “What is it, sweetie?” Suyy asked.

            “Thirty-six!”

            “Good job!”

            “Yeah, kid. We all know how to do basic math,” one of the Ravagers said in an irritated voice. He was slouching down in his seat, a beer bottle to his lips, a fairly fresh recruit after the rather disastrous operation on Hiqoo IX had forced Yondu to start hiring again. Yondu was blanking on his name for the moment.

            Meredith’s enthusiasm instantly disappeared. He looked down, putting his fingers in his mouth.

            Yondu slammed his glass down on the table and glared. The entire atmosphere at the table chilled as everyone went silent. The guy did not seem to have realized that his comment would produce such an effect. He tensed up defensively, darting his eyes toward Yondu.

            “You do, huh? Tell me, if my arrow takes three seconds to go through your skull—maybe four, if it’s as thick as it seems to be—and we’re about 250 microbules apart, how fast does it travel?”

            The man froze. Perhaps he had chosen a life of piracy because he had dropped out of school, and with his temperament and criminal record, there were few career options available. Perhaps he had chosen the Ravager life to get away from his word problems in addition to his legal problems. Either way, all of his problems ended very shortly as Yondu whistled. The body slumped to the table. The prostitute that had attached herself to him didn’t know what happened, even as she watched the arrow fly back into Yondu’s hand. The point of it was flecked with blood and brain matter, so he cleaned it off with a napkin before holstering it.

            The sight of a dead body was enough to make Meredith look up from his pad. The alien looked rather much the same as he did living, except now there was a hole through his forehead and a matching one out to back slowly oozing blood.

            “83 1/3 microbules per second,” Meredith said. “I had to use the calculator, though.”

            “Uh, what do you want us to do with him, Captain?” Kraglin asked, not too pleased that he had to cut into his drinking and whoring time for body disposal.

            Yondu looked over to Usha.

            “Hey, this is a _respectable_ establishment,” she said, pushing him slightly. “You bring your bodies in, you bring them out!”

            “Just dump it somewhere,” Yondu said. “We’ll be gone by the time anyone finds it.” He had polished off another shot of whiskey, and now he had to go to the bathroom. He was quite sure that any attempt on his part to stand up would be met with extreme dizziness, which he was not looking forward to, but needs must.  

            “Do you have to go to the bathroom, Meredith?” he asked, standing up and bracing himself on the table while he waited for the dizziness to pass.

            “Yes!” Meredith said, hopping out of his chair. He wended his way to the bathroom far faster than Yondu, who wasn’t so sure on his feet. 

            Unfortunately, he couldn’t even piss in peace, as Meredith started pelting him with questions. “Hey…was that a bad thing to do?”

            “What?” Yondu asked, his alcohol-addled brain naively hoping that Meredith would fuck right off.

            No hope there. “Was that a bad thing to do?”

            “I can do whatever I want with my crew.”

            “Am I your crew?”

            “No. You’re my son.”

            “Is Mama your crew?”

            “Yes,” Yondu said, zipping his pants back up. What a conversation to have with your dick out.

            “Are you going to kill Mama?”

            Yondu looked at Meredith. He had that shy look on his face, but with big eyes waiting to hear his answer.

            “I’m not gonna kill your mama,” Yondu muttered, passing his hand under the soap dispenser. Meredith did the same, though he was not quite tall enough to comfortably reach the sink.

            When Yondu opened the bathroom door, he was suddenly assaulted by the throbbing music, making his head spin, and Meredith bumping into him from behind didn’t help.

            “Watch where you’re going!” he snapped. Meredith looked down at the floor, but reached up and held his father’s hand. He rubbed at his eyes with the other.

            “Are you sleepy?”

            “No!” Meredith claimed immediately. Now that he had taken a break from all the excitement, the fact that it was way past his bedtime was starting to catch up with him.

            When they got back to their seats, Meredith crawled into Yondu’s lap and watched the proceedings with half-closed eyes, as efficient a cockblock as any. At some point in the night when Yondu was shifting uncomfortably, he realized that Meredith had fallen asleep. He didn’t remember the rest of the night, which had been the plan.


End file.
